Forms of traditional entertainment such as video games, movies, and television create a simulated reality. These forms of entertainment are limited in how someone can interact with the medium. In the case of a video game (and web and mobile games) a player can only interact with the game through it's designed medium, traditionally a digital medium utilizing a graphical user interface with a set of control mechanisms. On the one hand, the player uses these control mechanisms to take actions in the game causing reactions and progression of the game state, which is generally reflected visually and/or aurally via the graphical user interface through the digital medium. The player is controlling part of this simulated reality through these control mechanisms, which in conjunction with the game engine itself, constitutes the basis for video games and their respective counterparts such as web and mobile games.
On the other hand, athletic endurance events such as walking, foot races, triathlons, and obstacle races test a participant's physical athletic performance by measuring the time it takes them to complete the event's course. Current athletic endurance events use a predetermined course that participants must travel between the start and finish lines. Courses can vary in a number of factors depending on the event type, including, but not limited to: total distance, vertical gain and loss, terrain, obstacles that must be completed before continuing on as found in obstacle races, and as is the case in multi-sport races, different types of locomotion that must be used to traverse specific sections of a course. At the conclusion of almost all of these athletic endurance events, participants are placed into results based rankings, based on the elapsed time it took to complete the course for each participant in an ascending order, with the fastest (shortest elapsed time) participant placing first, and the slowest (longest elapsed time) participant placing last.
In almost all of these types of athletic endurance events, participants are given a unique identifier, commonly referred to as a timing chip within the endurance race community, which uniquely identifies the elapsed time each participant took to complete the course (their result) within the event. These timing chips allow the event organizer to distinguish each participant's result from one another and place participants into results based standings in the appropriate order based on the elapsed time of each participant in an ascending order, with the fastest (shortest elapsed time) participant placing first, and the slowest (longest elapsed time) participant placing last.
The most widely used technology at present for capturing and managing these timing chips is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). There are a number of different types of RFID technology (High Frequency [HF] and Ultra High Frequency [UHF] for example) in the market used by current athletic endurance events, however they all work to accomplish the same goal: utilizing RFID tags (the unique identifier) worn by each participant to record timestamps at various data capture spots along an event's course such as exact start time, finish time, and sometimes as ‘split times’ at pre-determined intervals such as the halfway point on a marathon. These timestamps are recorded instantly and automatically as a participant's timing chip passes through an RFID field that's being generated by an RFID Reader at these various data capture spots. The majority of current athletic endurance events only use 2 of these timestamps to determine a participant's result (elapsed time) and therefore place in the final event standings; one to record the exact start time of each participant and one to record the exact finish time of each participant, the duration of time (elapsed time) between these two timestamps resulting in a participant's total amount of time they took to complete the course and thus their result. At the conclusion of the entire event a participant's place within standings is determined by their total elapsed time (their result). The advent of the instant teachings services to modify these distinct galaxies and in so doing, constitutes invention.